A Fable

He didn’t think Why yet. He just thought What. He had never heard of a recess in war. But then, he knew so little about war; he realised now that he knew nothing about war. He would ask Bridesman, glancing about the room where they were already beginning to disperse, and in the first moment realising that Bridesman was not there, and in the next one that none of the flight commanders were there: not only Bridesman, but Witt and Sibleigh too, which in Witt’s case obviously meant that he still had C Flight out on the mid-morning job, and which—the fact that C Flight was still carrying on with the war—ratified the major’s words; C Flight hadn’t quit, and if he knew Bridesman (and after three weeks he certainly should) B hadn’t either, glancing at his watch now: half after ten, thirty minutes yet before B would go up; he would have time to finish the letter to his mother which Bridesman had interrupted yesterday; he could even—since the war would officially begin for him in thirty minutes—write the other one, the succinct and restrained and modestly heroic one to be found among his gear afterward by whoever went through it and decided what should be sent back to his mother: thinking how the patrol went up at eleven and the remand would begin at twelve, which would leave him an hour—no, it would take them ten minutes to get to the lines, which would leave fifty minutes; if fifty minutes was long enough for him to at least make a start after Bishop’s and McCudden’s and Mannock’s records, it would be long enough for him to get shot down in too: already moving toward the door when he heard engines: a flight: taking off: then running up to the hangars, where he learned that it was not even B Flight, shouting at the sergeant, incredulous and amazed:

‘Do you mean that all three flight commanders and all the deputies have gone out in one patrol?’ and then heard the guns begin, not like any heavy firing he had ever heard before, but furious and simultaneous and vast in extent—a sound already in existence to the south-east before audibility began and still in existence to the north-west when audibility ceased. ‘They’re coming over!’ he shouted. ‘The French have betrayed us! They just got out of the way and let them through!’

‘Yes sir,’ the flight sergeant said. ‘Hadn’t you better get along to the office? They may be wanting you.’

‘Right,’ he said, already running, back up the vacant aerodrome beneath the sky furious with the distant guns, into the office which was worse than empty: the corporal not only sitting as always behind the telephone, but looking at him across the dogeared copy of Punch which he had been looking at when he first saw him three weeks ago. ‘Where’s the major?’ he cried.

‘Down at Wing, sir,’ the corporal said.

‘Down at Wing?’ he cried, incredulous, already running again: through the opposite door, into the mess, and saw everyone of the squadron’s new replacements like himself except himself, all sitting quietly about as though the adjutant had not merely arrested them but was sitting guard over them, and the adjutant himself sitting at the end of the mess table with his pipe and wound stripe and observer’s O and single wing above the Mons Star ribbon, and the squadron chessboard and the folded sheet of last Sunday’s Times chess problem laid out before him; and he (the child) shouting, ‘Cant you hear them? Cant you?’ so that he couldn’t hear the adjutant at all for his own noise, until the adjutant began to shout too:

‘Where have you been?’

‘Hangars,’ he said. ‘I was to go on the patrol.’

‘Didn’t anyone tell you to report to me here?’

‘Report?’ he said. ‘Flight Sergeant Conventicle——No,’ he said.

‘You’re——’

‘Levine.’

‘Levine. You’ve been here three weeks. Not long enough to have learned that this squadron is run by people especially appointed and even qualified for it. In fact, when they gave you those badges, they gave you a book of rules to go with them, to prevent you needing ever to rack your brains like this. Perhaps you haven’t yet had time to glance through it.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘What do you want with me?’

‘To sit down somewhere and be quiet. As far as this squadron is concerned, the war stopped at noon. There’ll be no more flying here until further notice. As for those guns, they began at twelve hours. The major knew that beforehand. They will stop at fifteen hours. Now you know that in advance too——’

‘Stop?’ he said. ‘Dont you see——’

‘Sit down!’ the adjutant said.

‘—if we stop now, we are beat, have lost——’

‘Sit down!’

He stopped then. Then he said: ‘Am I under arrest?’

‘Do you want to be?’