A Fable

He had already turned back toward the aerodrome when he saw the Harry Tate. At first he just watched it, merely alerting himself to overshoot it safely; they looked so big and were travelling so slowly that you always made the mistake of overestimating them if you were not careful. Then he saw that the thing obviously not only hoped but actually believed that it could cut him off—a Harry Tate, which usually had two Australians in it or one general-and-pilot, this one indubitably a general since only by some esoteric factor like extreme and even overwhelming rank could an R.E.8 even hope to catch an S.E. and send it to earth.

Which was obviously what this one intended to do, he throttling back now until the S.E. was hanging on its airscrew just above stalling. And it was a general: the two aeroplanes broadside on for a second or so, a hand in a neat walking-out glove from the observer’s seat gesturing him peremptorily downward until he waggled his wings in acknowledgment and put his nose down for home, thinking, Why me? What’ve I done now? Besides, how did they know where I was?——having suddenly a sort of vision of the whole sky full of lumbering R.E.8’s, each containing a general with a list compiled by frantic telephone of every absent unaccounted-for scout on the whole front, hunting them down one by one out of back-areas and harrying them to earth.

Then he reached the aerodrome and saw the ground signal-strip laid out on it; he hadn’t seen one since ground school and for a goodish while he didn’t even know what it was; not until he saw the other aeroplanes on the ground or landing or coming in to land, did he recognise it to be the peremptory emergency signal to all aircraft to come down, landing in his turn faster and harder than people liked to land S.E.’s because of their unhappy ground habits, taxi-ing in to the tarmac where, even before he could switch off, the mechanic was shouting at him: ‘The mess, sir! Right away! The major wants you at the mess right away!’

‘What?’ he said. ‘Me?’

‘Everyone, sir,’ the mechanic said. ‘The whole squadron, sir. Best hurry.’

He jumped down to the tarmac, already running, so young in breathing that he wouldn’t be nineteen for another year yet and so young in war that, although the Royal Air Force was only six weeks old, his was not the universal tunic with RFC badges superposed on the remnants of old regimental insigne which veteran transfers wore, and he didn’t even own the old official Flying Corps tunic at all: his was the new RAF thing not only unmartial but even a little epicene, with its cloth belt and no shoulder-straps like the coat of the adult leader of a neo-Christian boys’ club and the narrow pale blue ring around each cuff and the hat-badge like a field marshal’s until you saw, remarked, noticed the little modest dull gold pin on either side of it like lingerie-clips or say the christening’s gift-choice by godfathers whose good taste had had to match their pocket-books.

A year ago he was still in school, waiting not for his eighteenth birthday and legal age for joining up, but for his seventeenth one and the expiration, discharge, of a promise to his widowed mother (he was the only child) to stick it out until then. Which he did, even making good marks, even while his mind, his whole being, was sleepless and athirst with the ringing heroic catalogue: Ball: McCudden: Mannock: Bishop: Barker: Rhys Davies: and above all, simply: England. Three weeks ago he was still in England, waiting in Pilot’s Pool for posting to the front—a certificated stationary engine scout pilot to whom the King had inscribed We Reposing Trust and Confidence in Our Trusty and Well-Beloved Gerald David … but already too late, gazetted not into the RFC but into the RAF. Because the RFC had ceased to exist on April Fool’s day, two days before his commission came through: whereupon that March midnight had seemed to him a knell. A door had closed on glory; immortality itself had died in unprimered anti-climax: not his to be the old commission in the old glorious corps, the brotherhood of heroes to which he had dedicated himself even at the cost of that wrench to his mother’s heart; not his the old commission which Albert Ball had carried with him into immortality and which Bishop and Mannock and McCudden still bore in their matchless records; his only the new thing not flesh nor fowl nor good red herring: who had waited one whole year acquiescent to his mother’s unrational frantic heart fiercely and irrevocably immune to glory, and then another year in training, working like a beaver, like the very proverbial Trojan, to compensate for his own inability to say no to a woman’s tears.