A Fable

‘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?’

‘Right,’ he said. He sat down. It was twenty-two minutes past twelve hours; now it was not the Nissen walls which trembled, but the air they contained. Presently, or in time that is, it was thirteen hours, then fourteen, all that distant outside fury reduced now to a moiling diastole of motes where the sun slanted into the western windows; getting on for fifteen hours now and the squadron itself reduced to a handful of tyros who barely knew in which direction the front lay, under command of a man who had never been anything but a poor bloody observer to begin with and had even given that up now for a chessboard: they still sat there: he, and the other new men who had— must have—brought out from England with them the same gratitude and pride and thirst and hope——Then he was on his feet, hearing the silence still falling like a millstone into a well; then they were all moving as one, through the door and outside into that topless gape from which the walls and roof of distant gunfire had been ripped, snatched, as a cyclone rips the walls and roof from the rectangle of vacancy which a moment ago had been a hangar, leaving audibility with nothing now to lean against, outbursting into vacuum as the eardrums crack with altitude, until at last even that shocking crash died away.

‘That seems to be it,’ a voice said behind him.

‘Seems to be what?’ he said. ‘It’s not over! Didn’t you hear what the major said? The Americans aren’t quitting either! Do you think Monaghan’ (Monaghan was an American, in B Flight too; although he had been out only ten weeks, he already had a score of three and a fraction) ‘is quitting? And even if they do——’ and stopped, finding them all watching him, soberly and quietly, as if he were a flight commander himself; one said:

‘What do you think, Levine?’

‘Me?’ he said. ‘About what?’ Ask Collyer, he thought. He’s running the nursery now; bitterly too now: Ask Collyer——the pipe, the balding head, the plump bland face which at this moment was England’s sole regent over this whole square half-mile of French dirt, custodian of her honor and pride, who three years ago had probably brought out to France (he, Collyer, according to squadron folklore, had been ridden down by a Uhlan with a lance inside the war’s first weeks and turned flying observer and came out again and within a week of that managed somehow to live through a F.E. crash after his pilot was dead and since then, carrying the same single pip and—the legend said—the same cold pipe, had been a squadron adjutant) the same feeling, belief, hunger—whatever you want to call it—as intolerant and unappeasable as his own, and then lost it or put it aside as he had put the war itself forever away, secure and immune in his ground job where no thirst for victory nor tumescence of valor could trouble him more; thinking, Oh yes, ask Collyer, finishing the thought which the cessation of the guns had interrupted inside the mess: He has quit too. He gave up so long ago that he doesn’t even remember now that he hasn’t even lost anything.—I heard the death of England he said quietly to himself, then aloud: ‘Think about what? That noise? Nothing. That’s what it sounds like, doesn’t it?’

At five oclock the major was delivered almost onto the office stoop by the general commanding the brigade’s Harry Tate. Just before sunset two lorries drove onto the aerodrome; watching from his hut he saw infantry with rifles and tin hats get down and parade for a moment on the dusty grass behind the office and then disperse in squads and at sunset the patrol of flight commanders and deputies which had gone out at noon in the similitude of B Flight had not returned, three times longer than any patrol ever stayed out or than any S.E. could stay up on its petrol. And he dined with a mess (the major was not present though a few of the older men—including the infantry officer—were; he didn’t know where they had been nor when returned) half of whom he knew knew nothing either and the other half he didn’t know how much they knew or cared;—a meal which was not long before the adjutant got up and stopped just long enough to say, not speaking to the older people at all: ‘You aren’t confined to quarters. Just put it that almost any place you can think of is out of bounds.’