On Glorious Wings

by Stephen Coonts

  He flew steadily for a minute to regain lost height, and then got up speed again. This time he let the stick come back as it were of its own accord. The horizon dropped away, and he continued upwards drawing the stick towards him with only the minimum of pressure that would make it continue to come back. There was no unpleasant feeling either of pressure or falling and he was sitting quite comfortably when the opposite horizon appeared from behind him, and he knew he was successfully over the top. He shut off the petrol and let the stick go slowly forwards while the cloud-floor swung past and the horizon he had originally been facing reappeared. A perfect loop ending in a normal glide.

  Tom went on talking until he thought they might have heard enough of his voice for one evening, and then he forbore. The air was still shaking with the unceasing gunfire. They played bridge. Tom was out of luck; kings were in the wrong place, distribution upset his attempts to establish: but what did it matter at a franc a hundred? He was like a generalissimo sending his forces to do battle; if they were slaughtered it mattered very little to him. The game, the battle was the thing. How ever many more clubs had the fellow got? Where ever did they get all the explosives from to keep up this interminable tattoo? It was very trying when an opponent established a long suit and you had to throw away a lot of good cards; but it was all in the game. Re-deal and play a fresh hand. He wondered how the new American troops were liking the war. A useful hand this time if his partner could support him a little better than last time. The Americans would be more effective allies than the Russians. . . .

  In the morning, after family breakfast at eight o’clock, all the staff except the padre went off to attend to duties. The padre was good company and the morning passed pleasantly enough. The battle still raged and there were rumours of a big German break-through. The padre said that the death-roll was not terrible to a believer in personal immortality; how could it be? It had never occurred to Tom before that this queer belief could be practically efficacious; and could it, indeed, to a combatant? To old-style Mohammedans and such, yes; but to civilized Christians? If it could, here was another pernicious effect of religion, to encourage war by removing dislike of death. At every turn, it seemed to him, the religious, with their preposterous insistence on the unimportance of the world (except as a snare, the barbarians!) hindered mankind from making the world comfortable. They did not believe their own doctrine after they were thirty, but it was part of their mental habit then, and so very useful for keeping young people in order and swindling them into fighting their elders’ wars. God, what a wicked crew!

  “Apart, for the moment, from revelation,” he said to the padre, “do you think there is any logical reason for believing that one is immortal?”

  The padre thought it was one of those subjects where the reasons pro and contra balanced, and it was impossible to know anything about it except by revelation. The Christian Revelation established the fact but left the mode quite uncertain, as he read the scriptures. That did not matter; the fact was sufficient.

  How the deuce could an otherwise reasonable man of the twentieth century talk comfortably about the Christian revelation? It was one of those extraordinary failures of human intelligence that Tom could see no accounting for.

  After lunch he telephoned to the squadron to inquire about his transport. It would be there that day some time. The squadron was busy.

  _______

  1Air Mechanic.

  ALL THE DEAD

  PILOTS

  by WILLIAM FAULKNER

  One of the true giants of American literature, William Faulkner (1897–1962), along with many of the other authors in this volume, had a passion for writing and a burning desire to fly. After being passed over for the U.S. Army Air Corps because of his height, Faulkner lied about his personal history and passed himself off as British to get into the Royal Air Force in Canada during World War I. He was accepted and trained in Toronto, but the war ended before he could be certified.

  “All the Dead Pilots” is Faulkner’s take on flying during the crazy World War I years, when the airplanes were barely safer than their original counterparts invented scarcely fifteen years before. The first part of the story is a brief prologue about pilots after their tour of duty is over, and how the “pilot” dies, leaving only the man behind, grounded for the rest of his life. But then, Faulkner turns ninety degrees and recounts the tale of an American, one of the notorious Snopes family, and his rivalry with a British officer. Love, war, death, and airplanes—all come together in a masterful short tale by one of the twentieth century’s greatest authors.

  I

  In the pictures, the snapshots hurriedly made, a little faded, a little dog-eared with the thirteen years, they swagger a little. Lean, hard, in their brass-and-leather martial harness, posed standing beside or leaning upon the esoteric shapes of wire and wood and canvas in which they flew without parachutes, they too have an esoteric look; a look not exactly human, like that of some dim and threatful apotheosis of the race seen for an instant in the glare of a thunderclap and then forever gone.

  Because they are dead, all the old pilots, dead on the eleventh of November, 1918. When you see modern photographs of them, the recent pictures made beside the recent shapes of steel and canvas with the new cowlings and engines and slotted wings, they look a little outlandish: the lean young men who once swaggered. They look lost, baffled. In this saxophone age of flying they look as out of place as, a little thick about the waist, in the sober business suits of thirty and thirty-five and perhaps more than that, they would look among the saxophones and miniature brass bowlers of a night club orchestra. Because they are dead too, who had learned to respect that whose respect in turn their hardness had commanded before there were welded center sections and parachutes and ships that would not spin. That’s why they watch the saxophone girls and boys with slipstream-proof lipstick and aeronautical flasks piling up the saxophone crates in private driveways and on golf greens, with the quick sympathy and the bafflement too. “My gad,” one of them—ack emma, warrant officer pilot, captain and M.C. in turn—said to me once; “if you can treat a crate that way, why do you want to fly at all?”

  But they are all dead now. They are thick men now, a little thick about the waist from sitting behind desks, and maybe not so good at it, with wives and children in suburban homes almost paid out, with gardens in which they putter in the long evenings after the 5:15 is in, and perhaps not so good at that either: the hard, lean men who swaggered hard and drank hard because they had found that being dead was not as quiet as they had heard it would be. That’s why this story is composite: a series of brief glares in which, instantaneous and without depth or perspective, there stood into sight the portent and the threat of what the race could bear and become, in an instant between dark and dark.

  II

  In 1918 I was at Wing Headquarters, trying to get used to a mechanical leg, where, among other things, I had the censoring of mail from all squadrons in the Wing. The job itself wasn’t bad, since it gave me spare time to experiment with a synchronized camera on which I was working. But the opening and reading of the letters, the scrawled, brief pages of transparent and honorable lies to mothers and sweethearts, in the script and spelling of schoolboys. But a war is such a big thing, and it takes so long. I suppose they who run them (I don’t mean the staffs, but whoever or whatever it is that controls events) do get bored now and then. And it’s when you get bored that you turn petty, play horse.

  So now and then I would go up to a Camel squadron behind Amiens and talk with the gunnery sergeant about the synchronization of the machine guns. This was Spoomer’s squadron. His uncle was the corps commander, the K.G., and so Spoomer, with his Guards’ Captaincy, had also got in turn a Mons Star, a D.S.O., and now a pursuit squadron of single seaters, though the third barnacle on his tunic was still the single wing of an observer.

  In 1914 he was in Sandhurst: a big, ruddy-colored chap with china eyes, and I like to think of his uncle sending for him when the ne
ws got out, the good news. Probably at the uncle’s club (the uncle was a brigadier then, just recalled hurriedly from Indian service) and the two of them opposite one another across the mahogany, with the newsboys crying in the street, and the general saying, “By gad, it will be the making of the Army. Pass the wine, sir.”

  I daresay the general was put out, not to say outraged, when he finally realized that neither the Hun nor the Home Office intended running this war like the Army wanted it run. Anyway, Spoomer had already gone out to Mons and come back with his Star (though Ffollansbye said that the general sent Spoomer out to get the Star, since it was going to be one decoration you had to be on hand to get) before the uncle got him transferred to his staff, where Spoomer could get his D.S.O. Then perhaps the uncle sent him out again to tap the stream where it came to surface. Or maybe Spoomer went on his own this time. I like to think so. I like to think that he did it through pro patria, even though I know that no man deserves praise for courage or opprobrium for cowardice, since there are situations in which any man will show either of them. But he went out, and came back a year later with his observer’s wing and a dog almost as large as a calf.

  That was in 1917, when he and Sartoris first came together, collided. Sartoris was an American from a plantation at Mississippi, where they grew grain and Negroes, or the Negroes grew the grain—something. Sartoris had a working vocabulary of perhaps two hundred words, and I daresay to tell where and how and why he lived was beyond him, save that he lived in the plantation with his great-aunt and his grandfather. He came through Canada in 1916, and he was at Pool. Ffollansbye told me about it. It seems that Sartoris had a girl in London, one of those three-day wives and three-year widows. That’s the bad thing about war. They—the Sartorises and such—didn’t die until 1918, some of them. But the girls, the women, they died on the fourth of August, 1914.

  So Sartoris had a girl. Ffollansbye said they called her Kitchener, “because she had such a mob of soldiers.” He said they didn’t know if Sartoris knew this or not, but that anyway for a while Kitchener—Kit—appeared to have ditched them all for Sartoris. They would be seen anywhere and any time together, then Ffollansbye told me how he found Sartoris alone and quite drunk one evening in a restaurant. Ffollansbye told how he had already heard that Kit and Spoomer had gone off somewhere together about two days ago. He said that Sartoris was sitting there, drinking himself blind, waiting for Spoomer to come in. He said he finally got Sartoris into a cab and sent him to the aerodrome. It was about dawn then, and Sartoris got a captain’s tunic from someone’s kit, and a woman’s garter from someone else’s kit, perhaps his own, and pinned the garter on the tunic like a barnacle ribbon. Then he went and waked a corporal who was an ex-professional boxer and with whom Sartoris would put on the gloves now and then, and made the corporal put on the tunic over his underclothes. “Namesh Spoomer,” Sartoris told the corporal. “Cap’m Spoomer;” swaying and prodding at the garter with his finger. “Distinguishing Sheries Thighs,” Sartoris said. Then he and the corporal in the borrowed tunic, with his woolen underwear showing beneath, stood there in the dawn, swinging at one another with their naked fists.

  III

  You’d think that when a war had got you into it, it would let you be. That it wouldn’t play horse with you. But maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe it was because the three of them, Spoomer and Sartoris and the dog, were so humorless about it. Maybe a humorless person is an unflagging challenge to them above the thunder and the alarms. Anyway, one afternoon—it was in the spring, just before Cambrai fell—I went up to the Camel aerodrome to see the gunnery sergeant, and I saw Sartoris for the first time. They had given the squadron to Spoomer and the dog the year before, and the first thing they did was to send Sartoris out to it.

  The afternoon patrol was out, and the rest of the people were gone too, to Amiens I suppose, and the aerodrome was deserted. The sergeant and I were sitting on two empty petrol tins in the hangar door when I saw a man thrust his head out the door of the officers’ mess and look both ways along the line, his air a little furtive and very alert. It was Sartoris, and he was looking for the dog.

  “The dog?” I said. Then the sergeant told me, this too composite, out of his own observation and the observation of the entire enlisted personnel exchanged and compared over the mess tables or over pipes at night: that terrible and omniscient inquisition of those in an inferior station.

  When Spoomer left the aerodrome, he would lock the dog up somewhere. He would have to lock it up in a different place each time, because Sartoris would hunt until he found it, and let it out. It appeared to be a dog of intelligence, because if Spoomer had only gone down to Wing or somewhere on business, the dog would stay at home, spending the interval grubbing in the refuse bin behind the men’s mess, to which it was addicted in preference to that of the officers. But if Spoomer had gone to Amiens, the dog would depart up the Amiens road immediately on being freed, to return later with Spoomer in the squadron car.

  “Why does Mr. Sartoris let it out?” I said.“Do you mean that Captain Spoomer objects to the dog eating kitchen refuse?”

  But the sergeant was not listening. His head was craned around the door, and we watched Sartoris. He had emerged from the mess and he now approached the hangar at the end of the line, his air still alert, still purposeful. He entered the hangar. “That seems a rather childish business for a grown man,” I said.

  The sergeant looked at me. Then he quit looking at me. “He wants to know if Captain Spoomer went to Amiens or not.”

  After a while I said, “Oh. A young lady. Is that it?”

  He didn’t look at me. “You might call her a young lady. I suppose they have young ladies in this country.”

  I thought about that for a while. Sartoris emerged from the first hangar and entered the second one. “I wonder if there are any young ladies any more anywhere,” I said.

  “Perhaps you are right, sir. War is hard on women.”

  “What about this one?” I said. “Who is she?”

  He told me. They ran an estaminet, a “bit of a pub” he called it—an old harridan of a woman, and the girl. A little place on a back street, where officers did not go. Perhaps that was why Sartoris and Spoomer created such a furor in that circle. I gathered from the sergeant that the contest between the squadron commander and one of his greenest cubs was the object of general interest and the subject of the warmest conversation and even betting among the enlisted element of the whole sector of French and British troops. “Being officers and all,” he said.

  “They frightened the soldiers off, did they?” I said. “Is that it?”The sergeant did not look at me.“Were there many soldiers to frighten off?”

  “I suppose you know these young women,” the sergeant said. “This war and all.”

  And that’s who the girl was. What the girl was. The sergeant said that the girl and the old woman were not even related. He told me how Sartoris bought her things—clothes, and jewelry; the sort of jewelry you might buy in Amiens, probably. Or maybe in a canteen, because Sartoris was not much more than twenty. I saw some of the letters which he wrote to his great-aunt back home, letters that a third-form lad in Harrow could have written, perhaps bettered. It seemed that Spoomer did not make the girl any presents. “Maybe because he is a captain,” the sergeant said. “Or maybe because of them ribbons he don’t have to.”

  “Maybe so,” I said.

  And that was the girl, the girl who, in the centime jewelry which Sartoris gave her, dispensed beer and wine to British and French privates in an Amiens back street, and because of whom Spoomer used his rank to betray Sartoris with her by keeping Sartoris at the aerodrome on special duties, locking up the dog to hide from Sartoris what he had done. And Sartoris taking what revenge he could by letting out the dog in order that it might grub in the refuse of plebeian food.

  He entered the hangar in which the sergeant and I were: a tall lad with pale eyes in a face that could be either merry or surly, and quite humorless. He
looked at me. “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello,” I said. The sergeant made to get up.

  “Carry on,” Sartoris said. “I don’t want anything.” He went on to the rear of the hangar. It was cluttered with petrol drums and empty packing cases and such. He was utterly without self-consciousness, utterly without shame of his childish business.

  The dog was in one of the packing cases. It emerged, huge, of a napped, tawny color; Ffollansbye had told me that, save for Spoomer’s wing and his Mons Star and his D.S.O., he and the dog looked alike. It quitted the hangar without haste, giving me a brief, sidelong glance. We watched it go on and disappear around the corner of the men’s mess. Then Sartoris turned and went back to the officers’ mess and also disappeared.