C

by Mccarthy, Tom

  “Archie pretty light today,” Gibbs leans back and shouts into his ear, quite nonchalantly.

  A German kite balloon emerges from beneath their tail. Serge thinks about strafing it, but sees that it’s being hurriedly winched down out of his range. It rises again as he draws away from it—strangely elongated, like a floating intestine. He unfolds his map and, holding it across his knees, runs his finger to the square in which the first hostile battery position’s marked out: should be about here … He taps Gibbs’s shoulder again and signals for him to fly in a square holding pattern. As Gibbs turns, then turns again, patrolling their small area’s boundaries, Serge can see the machines to his left and right describing the same patterns half a mile away. He looks down and, moving his eyes first in diagonals from corner to corner of his quadrant, then in smaller, darting cat’s cradles between landmarks, picks up the battery, secreted within a copse but nonetheless betrayed by the anachronistically autumnal patch of scorched and thinned-out leaves made by its discharges. He picks his spark set up again and taps in C3E, then A, then MX12, the target’s map coordinates. Then he signals to Gibbs to fly back to their side.

  Travelling in this direction, the tracer fire appears only after it’s already passed the plane, cutting long, slanted corridors into the air above him. It tilts up vertical, then starts angling forward, managing, through some optical and geometric sleight of hand, to reverse its direction without altering its flow until it’s rising at him from the ground. The intestinal kite balloon’s down again, then up; the magic puffs materialise beside them; the front line slides by unperceived once more, revealing in its wake a mesh of interlocking trenches which the same old English kite balloon announces as their own. The pockmarked village, road and woods run past below them one more time, then they’re back above Battery E. One of the Popham strip’s white lesser-than lines has been removed, the other straightened and lowered to the backbone cloth’s base, joining it at a right angle to form an L. Serge points Gibbs back towards the lines again, sending down A signals from his spark set as they go.

  They’re back above their target with three minutes to spare. The other machines are in position too: two to the north of him, one to the south, each marking out its assigned grid square, while a fifth machine moves up and down in long, straight lines behind them. It reminds Serge of a ritual he once saw illustrated in Boy’s Comic Journal: a ceremonial Red Indian dance to call down rain. The men in feathers marked their patterns out across the ground and the gods, summoned into action by these, sent down water. As the second-hand needle moves across the final quarter-segment of his watch’s face, Serge feels an almost sacred tingling, as though he himself had become godlike, elevated by machinery and signal code to a higher post within the overall structure of things, a vantage point from which the vectors and control lines linking earth and heaven, the hermetic language of the invocations, its very lettering and script, have become visible, tangible even, all concentrated at a spot just underneath the index finger of his right hand which is tapping out, right now, the sequence C3E MX12 G …

  Almost immediately, a white rip appears amidst the wood’s green cover on the English side. A small jet of smoke spills up into the air from this like cushion stuffing; out of it, a shell rises. It arcs above the trench-meshes and track-marked open ground, then dips and falls into the copse beneath Serge, blossoming there in vibrant red and yellow flame. A second follows it, then a third. The same is happening in the two-mile strip between Battery I and its target, and Battery M and its one, right on down the line: whole swathes of space becoming animated by the plumed trajectories of plans and orders metamorphosed into steel and cordite, speed and noise. Everything seems connected: disparate locations twitch and burst into activity like limbs reacting to impulses sent from elsewhere in the body, booms and jibs obeying levers at the far end of a complex set of ropes and cogs and relays. The salvos pause; Serge plots the points of impact on his clock-code chart, then sends adjustments back to Battery E, which fires new salvos that land slightly to the north of the first ones. Each one’s fall draws from the wood a new yellow-and-red flame-flower, with an outer white smoke-leaf that lingers after the bloom has faded. Serge sends one more correction; the shells shift fifteen or so yards to the east, and start arriving in regular fifteen-second bursts, their percussions overlapping with those falling in the neighbouring zones in sequences that speed up and slow down, like church bells’ chimes. A larger, darker bloom erupts from the copse beneath him: it seems to have more volume to it, more mass, billowing out and upwards like a dense, black chrysanthemum …

  “I think we got it,” Serge turns round and shouts to Gibbs.

  Gibbs points to his ear and shakes his head. Easier to communicate with the ground than with the man in the machine beside you. Serge sends an OK down to Battery E, then signals to Gibbs to move on to Battery F. They fly back across the lines and find this in the ruins of a village, Popham strips K’d up in response to their B sigs. They fly back again; Serge ranges the guns, plots the shells’ points of impact on his clock-code chart; then they move on to Battery G and do the same. Each time they shuttle to and fro, they pass through residues of tracer, Archie smoke and their own exhaust fumes hanging in the air. The shapes made when trails intersect, lines cutting across other lines at odd angles or bisecting puffballs’ circles to form strange figures, remind Serge of the phonetic characters his father would draw across the schoolroom’s whiteboard, the way the sequences would run and overlap. The lower section of this board’s become so crowded that it’s half-occluded: the morning’s light vapour blanket’s thickened to an opaque shawl. They have to fly lower to see where shells are landing, or even to get their own bearings. At one point a howitzer shell appears right beside them, travelling in the same direction—one of their own, surfacing above the smoke-bank like a porpoise swimming alongside a ship, slowly rotating in the air to show its underbelly as it hovers at its peak before beginning its descent. It’s so close that its wind-stream gently lifts and lowers the machine, making it bob. Serge knows that planes get hit by their own shells, but this one seems so placid, so companionable—and besides, if they’re travelling at the same speed then both it and they are just still bodies in space, harmless blocks of matter. In the instant before their paths diverge, it seems to Serge that the shell and the plane are interchangeable—and that the shell and he are interchangeable, just like the radians and secants on his clock-code chart, the smoke-and-vapour-marked points and trajectories around him, the angles of his holding pattern’s quadrant and the Popham strips’ abrupt cloth lines. Within the reaches of this space become pure geometry, the shell’s a pencil drawing a perfect arc across a sheet of graph paper; he’s the clamp that holds the pencil to the compass, moving as one with the lead; he is the lead, smearing across the paper’s surface to become geometry himself …

  On their way back to base, they strafe the German trenches. While Gibbs holds his line above them, Serge points his Lewis gun down and nudges it from side to side until its point seems to slot into their groove. A sixth sense tells him when he’s found it: he just feels it go in, somehow; when it does, it starts to play, the same track every time: of-PUR, pose-THAT, your-THOUGHT … Enemy gunfire crackles back at them like angry static. They reach the limit of their area, pull out and turn towards their own lines. The air over no-man’s-land is thick with cordite smoke: it has the rich, livery smell of homecoming. The kite balloon’s on the ground being deflated, the Popham strips rolled back up. The woods beside the airfield rustle as they skim them; the row of poplars bends the other way. Gibbs puts the wing down; the ground locks them in its drag; and then they’re taxiing across the field towards the Bessoneaus. Serge jumps out before the machine’s come to a complete standstill, while mechanics are still harnessing it with chocks and halters. With his brandy-flask and biscuit-box beneath his arm, he strolls towards the Nissen huts.

  “Narrative, Carrefax.” The recording officer, seated behind a table with a stack of papers
at the hangar’s exit, stops him.

  “What?” asks Serge, taking his glove off and wiping his hand across his face.

  “Flight narrative for Corps HQ. I have to remind you every time.”

  “Oh,” says Serge. “Well …” His hand has gathered a thick wedge of tar. He looks at it, then up at the recording officer. “We went up; we saw stuff; it was good.”

  ii

  Once, returning from the lines in fading light, zigzagging to dodge blue-black storm clouds, Serge and Gibbs find themselves landing on an aerodrome that’s not their own. They’re pretty sure it’s not a German one: the way the rain-curtains that sweep the ground are lit up, gold and precise with miniature rainbows in them, lets them know they’ve being flying west—but you can never be sure. The machines lying across the field are neither RE8s nor SE5s, and have storks painted on their fuselage. When Serge and Gibbs descend from theirs, mechanics greet them in a foreign language.

  “Perdu la route …” one of them shouts.

  “Oh, fuck!” snarls Gibbs. “Distract them while I climb back in and get my pistol. We can take off again before those others by the huts get over here.”

  “They’re French,” Serge tells him.

  “Français,” the mechanic nods—before, as though to prove it, launching into a rendition of “La Marseillaise.” Four pilots saunter over and serve them glasses of eau-de-vie, then stroll away across the field towards two sleek black cars against which elegantly dressed ladies lean smoking cigarettes through long ivory holders.

  “Bloody Cigognes,” snaps Clegg when Serge recounts the episode back in the mess. “Nothing but playboys: race-car drivers, fly-half of the national rugby team, the Compte de Trou-de-Cul. Balloon-busters: all they ever dare attack. Show them an EA and they’ll cack their French pantalons faster than the jardin de mon oncle. But soon as they get down from each day’s chicken run they’ve got Parisian hostesses whisking them off to see Manon and Salammbô while we sit here listening to scratched-up Felix Powell. There’s no justice in this war.”

  The Felix Powell is pretty scratched, it’s true. So are the Marie Lloyd, the Vesta Tilley and the Ella Shields. As they play them in the evenings, some of the officers dance together, drawing lots to see who’ll do the woman’s steps; others, meanwhile, reminisce about the war’s “golden era”:

  “Pity we don’t use parasols and Moranes anymore,” Watson sighs nostalgically. “Do you remember drop bags?”

  “Those things were great fun,” Dickinson says. “You’d scrawl your message in them, then just hurl them overboard above the reporting station, watch them drop. Radio killed all that.”

  “There was this pilot here when I first came,” Baldwick tells them. “Said he used to wave at EA pilots when he passed them. You had no beef with one another. He said the first time one of them took a pop at him, he couldn’t believe it: seemed so low …”

  “What happened to him?” Watson asks.

  “What do you think?” answers Baldwick. “Last year, or maybe late in ’fifteen. He was a flamer: carbonisé.”

  “Carbo-nee-zay,” Dickinson and Watson repeat in unison, as though the word held some kind of mantric power, like an “Amen.”

  “He was a real old-timer,” Baldwick tells them; “twenty-four or so.”

  Baldwick is twenty, one year older than Serge; Watson, twenty-one. They could have been flying with the 104th before he was born, as far as he’s concerned. Each month is like a generation here. This makes the twenty-four-year-old who used to wave at passing Germans like a distant ancestor, belonging more to an order of stone reliefs, illuminated manuscripts and tapestries whose stories don’t quite lend themselves to comprehension than to any present in which Serge might also have a place. Mess talk is full of predecessors such as him: the dead get more attention than the living. Each week, one or two more airmen join their Olympiad; as new ones replace them, Serge and the others move up the ancestral chain, one generation with every arrival. Before they take off for Artillery Observation or Contact Patrol work, pilots and observers pool their wages in a small iron commode that’s been chosen for this purpose for a reason—a precise one, yet one whose particulars have become so subject to conjecture and apocrypha that they’ve grown obscure; if one of the men doesn’t come back, his portion buys the rest an outing to the Encas Estaminet in Vitriers.

  The Encas’s décor is low-key. The walls of its two rooms are panelled with fly-brown mirrors; the zinc bar-top looks like it’s been reclaimed from a shot-down aeroplane or crashed Crossley truck, and hammered repeatedly in an attempt to flatten it that’s had the opposite effect: it’s all but impossible to keep a glass upright on its surface. The table tops are marble slabs that must have lost their lustre many years ago, worn down by greasy hands and dirty elbows, stained with wine. The whole place smells of spilt wine. Two waiters with hair so greasy that Gibbs once drunkenly accuses them of pilfering from the squadron’s engine-oil supplies move like slow spiders though a web of grey cigarette smoke that lingers as insistently as vapour trails and Archie-puffs above the battlefield.

  “Hey, garsson!” Clegg says as one of them sets two bottles down in front of him. “Send two more to those homosexuals from the Eighty-ninth in the next room. Comprennay? Two bootay; ’omosexuelle, katrer-vangt-nerf …”

  Serge explains in French to the waiter what Clegg means, and takes the bottles through himself. They often see the 89th men here; their aerodrome’s only four miles away. There’s one man named Carlisle whom Serge gets talking to each time they meet. Carlisle’s neither a pilot nor an observer, but an artist. He was studying at the Slade before the war, and got assigned to camouflage work, devising a whole system based on Goethe’s theory of colours and applying it to machines, painting blue, violet and yellow stripes across their wings and fuselage—before discovering that these only camouflaged the planes when seen against the ground, an asset deemed of such limited value that it was scrapped after only two machines had been thus decorated. Rather than recall him, the war office has kept him out here as an official War Artist, on secondment to the 89th. He hasn’t taken to his new post well.

  “It doesn’t work,” he moans as Serge pours him a glass. “It’s just not possible once you’re in flight.”

  “What’s not?” Serge asks.

  “Art! Tell me, Counterfax: what’s the first rule of landscape painting?”

  “Carrefax.” Serge thinks back to his afternoon sessions with Clair, but draws a blank. “Don’t know.”

  “Horizon!” Carlisle slaps the table. “Got to have a damn horizon if you’re going to paint a landscape! And what’s the first thing to disappear when some madman at your back is loopy-looping?”

  “Horizon?” Serge ventures.

  “Carvers, you’re a man of intellect. But you don’t understand the half of it, my friend! It’s not just the horizon that goes. Oh no. Look at this.” He moves three half-full wineglasses together. “Here are some clouds. And here,” he continues, dipping his finger in a wine-puddle and smearing it around the table top, “are the French fields with all their pretty patterned colours. When you look at them from here—” he pulls Serge’s head across to where his own was—“they run together. Which is cloud? Which land? Can you tell what part of the liquid’s in the glass and what’s on the table top?”

  “Does it matter?” Serge asks.

  “Course it bloody matters!” Carlisle shouts back. “How you going to paint something if you can’t even see what it is?” His voice goes hushed and urgent as he grasps a bottle and, moving it slowly above the three glasses, says: “A thundercloud passes over; a patch of woodland goes dark—or was it dark already? Who knows? And then, to make it worse, you suddenly come across a block of writing set bang in the middle of a clearing.”

  “Popham strips,” Serge tells him. “It’s because the batteries can’t send back wireless signals: only rec—”

  “I can’t paint words!” Carlisle’s voice rises half an octave. “Painting’s painting
, writing writing. Never the twain. It’s all wrong, aesthetically speaking: all the depth and texture of a summer countryside steamrollered into a flat page.”

  “That’s what I like about it,” Serge says.

  “I try not to look down,” Carlisle carries on, ignoring him as he drinks one of the clouds. “But looking up is just as bad! There’s no perspective in the sky, my friend. Some dot in front of you could be an EA swooping down to kill you, or a fly that’s landed on your nose, or for all I know the moon of Jupiter. You don’t have any measure to position yourself with …”

  “Yes you do,” Serge tells him. “You’re connected to everything around you: all the streaks and puffs …”

  “Ah, right: but how do you show those? The aircraft shell burst lasts a second—at its peak, I mean, the explosion itself, the bit I should be painting, seeing as I’m a War Artist and all that. A cloud is there forever—or at least for longer. What’s the honest thing to do, then? Give the shell the same substance as the cloud? How am I meant to paint time? How am I meant to paint anything?”

  “Why not just paint it as you see it?” Serge asks.

  “Can’t even do that,” Carlisle wails. “The stuff won’t stay still to be painted! Ground won’t stay still, air won’t stay still, nothing bloody stays still. Even the paint jumps from its bottles, gets all over me.”

  “Maybe that’s the art,” Serge says. “I mean the action, all the mess …”

  “Now, Carefors, you’re just talking rubbish,” Carlisle admonishes him in a disappointed tone. He drains another glass, then mutters bitterly: “It all comes from that show.”

  “What show?” Serge asks.

  “The bloody show!” Carlisle hisses. “Fry and his buddies. All this … this—” he gestures at the ceiling, or rather the sky, then at the cloud-glasses and field-puddle on the table top—“is just an extension of that.” He jabs a finger towards London. “Soon as the cork popped at the Grafton and the poison genie seeped out, this war was a foregone conclusion. Just a matter of time.”